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Barack Obama and America's Journey

a
James Darsey
a
Department of Communication , Georgia State University
Published online: 28 Jan 2009.
To cite this article: James Darsey (2009) Barack Obama and America's Journey, Southern
Communication Journal, 74:1, 88-103, DOI: 10.1080/10417940802571151
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Southern Communication Journal
Vol. 74, No. 1, January–March 2009, pp. 88–103
Barack Obama and America’s Journey

James Darsey
Downloaded by [University of California Santa Cruz] at 15:21 31 October 2014
Forty-one years after the original publication of Michael Osborn’s ‘‘Archetypal

Metaphor: The Light-Dark Family,’’ Jerold Hale sponsored a panel at the Southern
Communication Association honoring Osborn’s work. For my part, I was drawn to
the idea of employing archetypal metaphor as the central feature in an act of criticism.
In this essay, which grew out of my presentation on that panel, I argue that a significant
portion of the potency of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign derives from the con-
fluence of trajectories of two metaphorical journeys: Barack Obama’s personal journey
and America’s national journey.
Michael Osborn’s essays on archetypal metaphor, especially his essay on the light-
dark family, occupy a peculiar place in our discipline. They are widely read,
frequently cited, and often reprinted in anthologies, yet the archetypal metaphor,
Osborn’s hopes for it as a critical tool notwithstanding, has rarely been used by critics
other than Osborn as a tool for illuminating the dynamics of rhetorical texts.1
Perhaps we have been humbled by Osborn’s own work, challenging us, as it does,
with breathtaking surveys of Western literature within the compass of an essay.
Whatever the reasons, the power of archetypal metaphor as an instrument of
criticism is largely untapped.
The 2008 US presidential campaign—at full roar, all drums banging, as I write
this—offers an excellent opportunity to rectify this neglect and to explore the power
of archetypal metaphor as a critical tool. Behind the battle over the mantle of change
lurks the archetypal metaphor of the journey. Especially in the rhetoric of the Obama
campaign, the metaphor of the journey is the nucleus of what Osborn might recog-
nize as a ‘‘preferred pattern of imagery,’’2 a pattern organically connected to the man-
tra of change. In the February 10, 2007, speech announcing his candidacy for
president of the United States, Obama opened with the theme of travel, and a trip
James Darsey, Department of Communication, Georgia State University. Correspondence to: James Darsey,
Department of Communication, Georgia State University, P.O. Box 4000, Atlanta, GA 30302-4000. E-mail:
jdarsey@gsu.edu
ISSN 1041-794x (print) # 2009 Southern States Communication Association

DOI: 10.1080/10417940802571151
Barack Obama and America’s Journey 89
to Springfield, Illinois metamorphosed, first, into a national journey motivated by

hope and by faith in American ideals, and then, back to Obama’s geographical jour-
ney to Chicago, which in turn, becomes a synecdoche for the American journey from
limited circumstances to great success.3 And Obama has continued the use of the
metaphor of the journey into the final weeks of the campaign. As this essay was being
finished in mid-October, even after the issues of concern had undergone several
changes over the course of the campaign, after Iraq and foreign policy were eclipsed
by the near meltdown in the financial markets, the journey metaphor continued to
appear as a vehicle inviting the American people to join together to follow Obama
along the path out of our present circumstances and toward a new day ever closer
to the realization of America’s promise. In Dayton, Ohio on October 9, 2008, Obama

provided his interpretation of the lessons of the economic crisis that had, in recent
weeks, shaken the world: ‘‘There is no real separation between Main Street and Wall
Street. There is only the road we’re traveling on as Americans—and we will rise or fall
on that journey as one nation; as one people.’’4
Obama has crafted a campaign in which his personal journey has coincided with
America’s journey as a nation, especially as that journey involves race, and in the
confluence of these narrative trajectories, I will argue, lies much of the potency of
Obama’s rhetoric.
The Journey as Archetypal Metaphor

As Michael Osborn reminds us in his own essay in this issue, an essay in which he
provides a bird’s eye view of the path of his work, he, in one of his earliest published
essays, detailed the characteristics of the archetypal metaphor. Though Osborn,
looking back at work published 30 to 40 years ago, now expresses a mature man’s
cautious qualifications regarding the enthusiastic generalizations of his younger,
more reckless self, the metaphor of the journey appears to vindicate the younger
Osborn’s audacity. The metaphor of the journey holds up well against all six of
the features that Osborn ascribes to the archetypal metaphor.
In his exploration of the journey as metaphor, Northrup Frye defines the journey
as ‘‘a directed movement in time through space,’’5 and such movement forms a
central and perennial theme in Western literature, the fundamental meanings of
which are, perhaps paradoxically, apparently ‘‘immune to changes wrought by
time. ’’6 Simple invocation of the examples that everyone knows, the examples that
immediately spring to mind, is enough to make the point: Homer’s Odyssey; the
Exodus story of the ancient Jews; Osborn mentions in his essay in this issue his early
fascination with the Satans of Dante, and Dante’s Divine Comedy is a classic example
of the journey involving a ziggurat, a spiral path around a mountain or tower.7 Add
to these examples Pilgrim’s Progress, The Canterbury Tales, and every journey pre-
sented by the Brothers Grimm, and the list, though only partial and suggestive makes
a strong case that the journey is a powerful metaphorical element that maintains a
Jungian archetypal constancy across time and culture. If the list still appears provin-
cial or at least limited to the West, consider the eight-fold path of Buddhism or the
90 The Southern Communication Journal
Tao, often rendered ‘‘way,’’ of Confucianism.8 The easy adoption in Western culture
of the ancient proverb of Lao-tzu ‘‘A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a
single step’’ testifies to the fungibility of the journey metaphor.
Not all of our journey narratives are literary or fictional. The voyages of
Columbus, Ponce de Leon, and Hernando Cortez, the Lewis and Clark expedition,
our journey to the moon and beyond, even to ‘‘where no man has gone before,’’ these
narratives, while they concern the literal traversal of space and time, achieve their
prominence in the imagination because of their capacity to morph into the meta-
phorical, and in so doing, they serve the aspirational, epideictic function that Osborn
attributes to rhetorical depiction. In our collective imagination, these journeys are
less about what these historical figures did than they are about what we can do. In
this easy shift from the literal ground of experience fundamental to the human
condition, to the raising of that experience to metaphor, replete with purpose and
direction, to its refiguration as life lesson, is evidenced by the ‘‘double association’’
Osborn finds to be characteristic of archetypal metaphors.9
Robert Frost’s ‘‘The Road Not Taken’’ provides an iconic example of the transmu-
tation of the journey from the literal to the metaphorical. The poem begins in what is
by all appearances, literal space, ‘‘Two roads diverged in yellow wood,’’ but some-
where, what may have been literal space dissolves into psychological space as the
poem becomes a comment on the failure of virtue, the refusal of Emerson’s life of
self-reliance, and the poem’s final judgment, ‘‘and that has made all the difference,’’
we understand not to be a comment on a walk in the woods. The same is true for the
Odyssey, the Exodus story, and the rest.
The metaphor of the journey is so fundamental, so much a part of our collective
unconscious, its appeal is not limited to high literature. In 1970, we all joined Cat
Stevens ‘‘on the road to find out,’’ and we hear the metaphor reduced to cliché in
countless commencement speeches every year: ‘‘life’s journey,’’ ‘‘the paths you will
take,’’ ‘‘the long road of life.’’ Even these depredations it survives. The ubiquitous,
perhaps even promiscuous, character of the metaphor is such that, in the course
of writing this paper, I continued to stumble on examples in unexpected places.
One morning, I entered the building in which my office is located and noticed in
the lobby a placard advertising a presentation by Col. (ret) William T. (‘‘Bill’’)
Saunders. ‘‘Are you stuck in traffic?’’ queried the headline, the answer guaranteed
from virtually all Atlantans being ‘‘Yes.’’ ‘‘All of us are on the journey of life,’’ the
advertisement continued, ‘‘but most of us are stuck in traffic.’’ Though a long way
from Homer or the King James Bible or Bunyan, there is a fundamental kinship
between those stories and Col. Saunders’s promotional material.
A critical element of the journey metaphor, the element that distinguishes the
journey from mere movement, is purpose. The idea of progress has no application
to a walk in the park, but journeys are decidedly teleological. To return to Frye’s
definition, a journey is ‘‘directed movement in time through space.’’10 Even if
unknown at the outset, journeys have a direction and a destination; reward—whether
Yeats’s desire to dine with Landor and Donne or Housman’s promise of sleep to his
war-weary soldier—lies at journey’s end, in completion. Homer’s Odyssey chronicles
the long-delayed return of Ulysses to his home in Ithaca, his family, and his people.
In the Exodus story, Moses is ordered by God to lead the Israelites out of Egypt to ‘‘a
land of milk and honey’’ that God has saved for them. Hermann Stelzner explored
the quest as a specialized form of the journey, one in which a presumably precious
object (a thing, a person) must be sought and possessed, but the true value of which
could only be known in the conclusion of the search.11 Even when the purpose of
the journey is unknown to or not understood by the journeyer, as is the case with
Siegfried in Wagner’s Ring, the presence of a divine purpose provides direction.
The reason the drifter is perennially such an ominous figure is the opaqueness of
his or her (though, historically, his) purposes. His travel appears to be without direc-
tion; it is aimless and without reason. The ‘‘Sunday drive’’ and the ‘‘walk in the park’’
are the exceptions that prove the rule, and both already bear the too sweet smell of
anachronism and may require annotation for future generations.
America’s Journey
The metaphor of the journey has a special resonance in American culture. Beginning
with the narrative of our ‘‘errand into the wilderness,’’ the very idea of the United States
is conjoined with purpose, direction.12 Emerson, perhaps our greatest national sage,
described us as ‘‘a nation always in the process of becoming’’—‘‘directed movement
in time and space.’’ When Emerson, deeply influenced by Hegel and Carlyle, concluded
‘‘The American Scholar’’ with ‘‘A nation of men will for the first time exist because each
believes himself inspired by the Divine Soul, which also inspires all men,’’13 he gave voice
to a conceit widely held among his countrymen and women, then and now. America, for
Emerson, represents the end of history, or in a teleological mode, the fulfillment of his-
tory, the liberation and realization of human potential. The idea of ‘‘Manifest Destiny,’’
which guided America’s expansion across a continent and, when that journey ended on
the shores of the Pacific Ocean, our foreign policy, intimates one interpretation of that
journey toward fulfillment. In 1898, in one of the most fulsome expressions of ‘‘Manifest
Destiny’’ on record, Senator Albert Beveridge revealed the fragility of the membrane
separating the figurative from the literal when he asked, ‘‘Shall the American people
continue their march toward the commercial supremacy of the world? Shall free institu-
tions broaden their blessed reign as the children of liberty wax in strength, until the
empire of our principles is established over the hearts of all mankind?’’ Grounding his
appeal in our common myth of origin, placing the question of the Philippines in a direct
line running from the settling of the colonies, to independence, to our expansion across
the continent. ‘‘Will you remember that we do but what our fathers did—we but pitch
the tents of liberty farther westward, farther southward—we only continue the march
of the flag?’’14 Beveridge’s drumbeat repetitions, through the rest of the speech, of the
verb ‘‘march,’’ happily scumble the literal military journeys we would have to make
on behalf of his vision with the vision itself.
Though it may seem blasphemous, it is not unreasonable to suggest a fundamental
kinship between Beveridge’s view of America’s destiny and that of John F. Kennedy
when Kennedy, as does Beveridge, establishes a fundamental continuity between his
historical moment and our founding myths and finds there a map for a new leg of
our national journey, which in Kennedy’s inaugural address, becomes a marathon:
We dare not forget today that we are the heirs of that first revolution. Let the word
go forth fro this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been
passed to a new generation of Americans—born in this century, tempered by
war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage—and
unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which
this nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at
home and around the world.15
America and Americans have a purpose; we are on our way to somewhere. Jack Ker-
ouac’s transgressive aimlessness shocks and titillates us much as pornography does;

Americans are not road trippers.
The Road to Racial Equality in America

Central to the American ideal, to the American telos, is equality, especially equality of
opportunity and equality under the law, or justice. For African Americans and others,
the long journey along the path to equality has been one of twists, turns, rugged
terrain, and sometimes terrible reversals. When Frederick Douglass speaks of ‘‘the
whole history of the progress of human liberty,’’16 he speaks of a journey of which
such legs as the forced emigration of slaves, the Underground Railroad, the Great
Migration, and the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom are epicycles.
Happily, Celeste Condit and John Lucaites have authoritatively chronicled the
rhetorical arc of the African American journey toward equality,17 and I would only
emphasize here the inseparability of the African American journey and the American
journey. ‘‘The Negro has been formed by this nation, for better or for worse,’’ wrote
James Baldwin in The Fire Next Time, ‘‘and does not belong to any other.’’18 ‘‘You
know, and I know,’’ he told his nephew in a prefatory letter, ‘‘that the country is
celebrating one hundred years of freedom one hundred years too soon. We cannot
be free until they are free.’’19 Three years after Baldwin wrote those words, President
Lyndon Baines Johnson, speaking from a political hemisphere that seems so remote
from Baldwin, emphasized our national purpose and our commitment to equality
and justice. Johnson spoke of ‘‘the destiny of democracy.’’ ‘‘At times,’’ he said,
‘‘history and fate meet at a single time in a single place to shape a turning point
in man’s unending search for freedom.’’20 ‘‘Destiny’’ (which shares a root with ‘‘des-
tination’’), ‘‘turning point,’’ Johnson clearly sees the nation at a fork in the road on
its national journey. What fork we choose will indeed make all the difference: ‘‘And
should we defeat every enemy, should we double our wealth and conquer the stars,
and still be unequal on this issue [rights for African-Americans], then we will have
failed as a people and as a nation.’’21 America’s journey can only be successfully
completed when African Americans enjoy full equality; it is destined, preordained;
it is part of our national purpose, our mission; there will be no rest, no sleep, no
reward until we have fulfilled our covenantal duty.
Martin Luther King, Jr.’s last speech, so ably illuminated by Michael Osborn,22
provides a synecdochal expression of the African-American journey toward equality
as he connects a garbage strike in Memphis, Tennessee to the American exodus story
and to the Exodus story of the Old Testament. King ends the speech with uncertainty
for his own future, but with the promise that the successful completion of the journey
is inevitable: ‘‘I want you to know tonight that we as a people will get to the promised
land.’’23 Barack Obama, in the now famous ‘‘race speech’’ in Philadelphia in March
2008 and quoting his own words from Dreams from My Father, highlights the pro-
pinquity among these various levels of what he casts as one big journey. Describing
his first experience at Trinity United Church of Christ, Obama writes:
I imagined the stories of ordinary black people merging with the stories of David
and Goliath, Moses and Pharaoh, the Christians in the lion’s den, Ezekiel’s field of
dry bones. Those stories—of survival, and freedom, and hope—became our story,
my story; the blood that had spilled was our blood, the tears our tears; until this
black church, on this bright day, seemed once more a vessel carrying the story
of a people into future generations and into a larger world. Our trials and triumphs
became at once unique and universal, black and more than black; in chronicling
our journey, the stories and songs gave us a means to reclaim memories that
we didn’t need to feel shame about . . . memories that all people might study and
cherish—and with which we could start to rebuild.24
Accounts of journeys that may be historical, may be metaphorical—it hardly matters
here—become metaphors and merge with the journey narratives of African-Ameri-
cans. Aboard the vessel of the black church, the journey continues.
Barack Obama’s (African) American Journey

Barack Obama, in speech after speech and in his campaign biographies, places his
personal trajectory along the long, hard path that Americans and African Americans
have followed en route to the promised land.25 Obama’s discourse evidences a con-
sistent and sustained cultivation of the metaphor of the journey in as the controlling
metaphor for his campaign. It is not that the metaphor of the journey is unusual or is
unique to the Obama campaign. Consistent with its status as an archetypal metaphor,
the metaphor of the journey is, in fact, common. ‘‘Within the almost limitless range
of possibility for figurative association, such metaphors will be selected more
frequently than their non-archetypal approximations.’’26 What is distinctive about
Obama’s use of the metaphor is the way in which it registers as a motif for the
campaign, carefully developed and consistently deployed across time and occasions
and even by different spokespersons for the campaign.
Before an audience in Berlin Germany in July, 2008, Obama opened his speech by
placing himself and his audience on the same road described by American colonists,
by Kennedy, and by King:
The journey that led me here is improbable. My mother was born in the heartland
of America, but my father grew up herding goats in Kenya. His father—my grand-
father—was a cook, a domestic servant to the British.
At the height of the Cold War, my father decided, like so many others in the
forgotten corners of the world, that his yearning—his dream—required the free-
dom and opportunity promised by the West. And so he wrote letter after letter
to universities all across America until somebody, somewhere answered his prayer
for a better life.
That is why I’m here. And you are here because you too know that yearning.27
In Berlin, the story assumes the universality of the journey to freedom: an assump-
tion Obama shares, perhaps uncomfortably, with Senator Beveridge. Speaking back
home in the United States, Obama stresses the peculiarly American character of
his own instantiation of the Horatio Alger myth:
It’s the story of farmers and soldiers, city workers and single moms. It takes place in
small towns and in good schools, in Kansas and Kenya, on the shores of Hawaii and
in the streets of Chicago. It’s a varied and unlikely journey, but one that’s held
together by the same simple dream. And that is why it’s an American story.28
Anyone who has embraced the American dream of rising from modest circumstance
to the highest levels of American society must admire Obama’s life journey. It is the
fulfillment of our common dream and a testament to the viability of our ideals, the
achievement of success presumably through determination, pluck, hard work, and
resourcefulness, what Obama refers to as the ‘‘quintessentially American path of
upward mobility,’’29 the personal journey that the United States holds out to all
its citizens and the allure of the United States to many who are not its citizens. Oba-
ma’s success helps to keep our dreams alive. Obama’s campaign for the presidency
of the United States is an episode within the larger narrative of his life, and the
narrative of his life is an episode within the larger narrative of American history,
‘‘episodes’’ in the sense that they are ‘‘integral to but separable from a continuous
narrative.’’30 If Obama can succeed in making his campaign a journey that is coinci-
dent with our collective journey, then his campaign is refigured: not the race of
one man for the presidency of the United States but a vehicle for our common
striving to get the country back on the right track toward our common destiny,
the American Dream.
In his acceptance speech to the Democratic National Convention, Obama
referred to the primary race as a journey and he welcomed the opportunity to enter
the journey’s next phase, the campaign itself, with Joe Biden. By August 2008, the
audience had for months been cued to think of this race as a journey. After win-
ning the Iowa primary in January, Obama announced that the American people
had begun down ‘‘the road to change,’’31 and through the spring, the campaign
traveled as the ‘‘Road to Change’’ tour, which was revived after the Democratic
National Convention as the ‘‘On the Road to Change’’ tour. On June 3, the night
of the final Democratic primary, Obama declared, ‘‘tonight we mark the end of one
historic journey with the beginning of another—a journey that will bring a new and
better day to America.’’32 Just as journeys often entail challenges or tasks to be
performed along the way—slaying dragons, penetrating magic fire, recovering the
needle from the haystack—John McCain effectively challenged Obama to take an
international tour to prove his capacity to handle himself on the world stage,
and Obama successfully completed that challenge. Setbacks have been referred to as
‘‘bumps in the road.’’ Rather than engaging the war metaphors that so readily
accompany a ‘‘campaign,’’ itself a term with its roots in military strategy, Obama’s
own rhetoric gives preference to the metaphor of the journey. Obama does not so
much battle John McCain as he invites us down an alternate path, a path that
continues the trajectory of Obama’s own life, a life that stands as an exemplar of
the American Dream.
The Obama Candidacy and the Confluence of Three Journeys

The ‘‘double association’’ that Osborn ascribes to archetypal metaphors makes

understandable the rhetorical function served by Obama’s casting of his campaign
as a journey, a epicycle to and synecdoche for the American journey. In one direction,
the metaphor allows Americans to recognize the Obama campaign as something
familiar, as something in which we participate, both in our individual lives and in
our collective consciousness, creating, in turn, a form of Burkean identification so
that we come to see ourselves in what was initially strange: ‘‘the skinny kid with a
funny name,’’ the child of a mixed-race marriage is our ideal self. In the other direc-
tion, the metaphor allows us to extrapolate outward from the Obama campaign to
our national destiny.
African Americans have, in large numbers, put aside early concerns over whether
Obama was ‘‘black enough’’ and have embraced his journey as a synecdoche for the
African American journey. Under a campaign button that said ‘‘What’s in it for us?’’
The Black Entertainment Network promoted its special coverage of the Democratic
National Convention and Obama’s acceptance speech, which was followed by a BET
News special titled ‘‘Obama’s Journey to the Whitehouse.’’ Introducing the promo-
tional video, the BET’s Andre Showell noted that BET viewers had watched Obama’s
‘‘every step from the statehouse to the Whitehouse,’’ and, now, he said, ‘‘Hope your
seatbelt’s fastened’’—this segment of the journey is apparently going to be fast-—
‘‘because we’re taking you on a ride through the highs and the lows, the twists
and turns of this historic campaign’’—the ziggurat becomes a part of Obama’s jour-
ney. ‘‘What he’s done for African Americans, said rapper Pras in an interview with
Sharon Carpenter, part of the promotion for the news special, is to say ‘‘I, too,
can do this.’’33 The celebration by BET and Pras’s assessment serve as signals of
Obama’s acceptance as a synecdoche for black America.
Obama, for his part, reinforces the sense of kinship between his journey and the
African American journey. Speaking in March 2007 at the site of some of the most
tumultuous moments in the history of the Civil Rights Movement before an audience
that included some of the leaders of that movement, Barack Obama connected his
journey and the journey of his generation to that segment of the journey that had
been navigated by the ‘‘Moses generation.’’
I’m here because somebody marched. I’m here because you all sacrificed for me. I
stand on the shoulders of giants. I thank the Moses generation; but we’ve got to
remember, now, that Joshua still had a job to do. As great as Moses was, despite all
that he did, leading a people out of bondage, he didn’t cross over the river to see
the Promised Land. God told him your job is done. You’ll see it. You’ll be at
the mountain top and you can see what I’ve promised. What I’ve promised to
Abraham and Isaac and Jacob. You will see that I’ve fulfilled that promise but
you won’t go there. We’re going to leave it to the Joshua generation to make
sure it happens. There are still battles that need to be fought; some rivers that need
to be crossed.34
There are a number of features that deserve noting here. First, there is the rhetori-
cal necessity for Obama to make the connection between his struggle and the histori-
cal struggle of black Americans. The embrace evidenced in the BET special and
promotions was not inevitable. Just over six months after Obama gave this speech
in Selma, Alabama, with Georgia congressman John Lewis, whom Obama has, on
this occasion and on others, singled out for special appreciation, sitting in the front
row, Lewis endorsed Hillary Clinton for president. The connection of the Obama
campaign to the struggles of African Americans has been welded rhetorically.
Second, in addition to paying homage to the giants on whose shoulders he stands,
Obama’s use of the Biblical example, again of the Exodus story, stresses continuity
between the efforts of those giants and his efforts. The use of the Exodus story ending
with Moses’ knowledge that he will not enter the Promised Land with his people
recalls the leader who is absent from the audience in Selma but very much present
in everyone’s mind, the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. and King’s last speech, and it
highlights the need for a successor to King. Third, while subtracting nothing from
the achievements of King and the ‘‘Moses generation,’’ Obama carves out important
work for himself and for his generation, the ‘‘Joshua generation.’’ The ‘‘Moses gen-
eration’’ guided us along a portion of the path and guided us well, but the path is
long, too long for that generation to take us to its end. The ‘‘Joshua generation’’
must continue where the ‘‘Moses generation’’ left off with no expectation that it will
see the completion of the journey either. We are always moving toward an ideal,
toward ‘‘a more perfect union.’’ Fourth, all of this is cast in terms of a journey,
an epic journey from the Judeo-Christian tradition standing as a metaphor for the
African American journey. There is an inescapable linearity here that runs from
the ancient Jews, to American pilgrims, to African Americans, to Barack Obama—
‘‘directed movement through time and space.’’ Fifth, and finally, the journey can
be navigated; there are cause and effect relationships that can be discovered; the
powers of the universe can be harnessed to move us along the path to our destiny;
courses can be charted. Just as Obama was in Berlin because he inherited a belief that
his yearning for a better life could be fulfilled, he is in Selma, is running for presi-
dent, ‘‘because somebody marched,’’ and now the Joshua generation must march if
African Americans are to make it to the next milestone. Obama has a compass; our
proper direction is discernable.
On April 4, 2008, in a speech commemorating the 40th anniversary of the death of
Martin Luther King, Jr., Obama again placed his audience along the trajectory
described by King and charged that audience with carrying on with the journey.
Obama reminded his listeners of King’s notion that the arc of the moral universe is
long, but that it bends toward justice:
But what he also knew was that it doesn’t bend on its own. It bends because each of
us puts our hands on that arc and bends it in the direction of justice.
So on this day—of all days—let’s each do our part to bend that arc.
Let’s bend that arc toward justice.
Let’s bend that arc toward opportunity.
Let’s bend that arc toward prosperity for all.35
The arc is a navigational device; it is the path described by extending the light of a
pole star, the drinking gourd; it is the rainbow that marks the journey’s end and
locates its rewards. It directs us toward a destination, a direction to which it naturally

points, but the successful arrival at which also requires our agency.
Obama’s repeated invocations of King seem inevitable, but this must not obscure
the important rhetorical function King serves as Obama seeks, as he must, to extend
the confluence of his journey beyond the African American journey to the flow
of the larger American journey. Forty years after his death, Martin Luther King, Jr.
is a liminal symbol in American politics. King stands on a threshold at the racial
divide, forever placed in America’s memory at the base of the Lincoln Memorial pro-
fessing belief in an American Dream that strives toward racial equality, a dream in
which ‘‘their destiny is tied up with our destiny and their freedom is inextricably
bound to our freedom’’; a dream that will only be fulfilled when ‘‘the sons of former
slaves and the sons of former slaveowners can sit down together at the table of
brotherhood.’’36 It is this Martin Luther King whom Obama repeatedly invokes in
his speeches, a King who reaches across a hundred years of American history to
Lincoln, and in this arc lies part of the significance of Obama’s choice of Springfield,
Illinois as the venue for announcing his candidacy.
In that speech in February 2007, Obama casts Springfield as a place of conver-
gence, a place where we transcend our divisions and find ourselves as Americans.
‘‘It was here, in Springfield, where North, South, East and West come together that
I was reminded of the essential decency of the American people—where I came to
believe that through this decency, we can build a more hopeful America,’’ Obama
declares and then invokes Lincoln’s admonition that a divided house cannot stand.37
A paragraph later, Obama provides a sketch in broad strokes of the American
journey, concluding with King:
We’ve changed this country before. In the face of tyranny, a band of patriots
brought an Empire to its knees. In the face of secession, we unified a nation and
set the captives free. In the face of Depression, we put people back to work and
lifted millions out of poverty. We welcomed immigrants to our shores, we opened
railroads to the west, we landed a man on the moon, and we heard a King’s call to
let justice roll down like water, and righteousness like a mighty stream.38
It is not only African Americans who want to believe that the arc bends toward justice,
opportunity, and prosperity for all; Americans of every race want to believe this about
ourselves. We want to believe in our continued capacity for progress toward our
destiny. In his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention, Obama
conjures King in a near apostrophe, Obama’s use of the ‘‘Now is the time’’ anaphora
from King’s ‘‘I Have a Dream’’ speech. Obama applies King’s bid to a context that
moves beyond race.39 Americans have a progressive view of history in general and
particularly of our own history. In The Audacity of Hope, Obama quotes from the
preamble to the Declaration of Independence and notes: ‘‘Those simple words are
our starting point as Americans; they describe not only the foundation of our govern-
ment but the substance of our common creed.’’40 Later in the same book, Obama
quotes himself to the effect that it is ‘‘a fundamental element of the American
character . . . that we can constantly remake ourselves to fit our larger dreams.’’41
Obama’s ‘‘race speech,’’ ‘‘A More Perfect Union,’’ one of the most important and
most highly publicized speeches of the campaign, illuminates the nexus at which
Obama seeks to transcend the limits of racial identification and to identify his nar-
rative with the American narrative. Obama begins that speech by invoking the
American exodus story, reminding his listeners of the ‘‘farmers and scholars;
statesmen and patriots who had traveled across an ocean to escape tyranny and
persecution.’’42 As with his treatment of the ‘‘Moses generation’’ of the Civil Rights
Movement, Obama does not concentrate on the defects of what the Founders did; he
instead casts the Constitution as ‘‘unfinished,’’ the projection of a journey, noble in
itself, but not complete. The Constitution, in Obama’s framing, is a road map to an
ideal, the ‘‘ideal of equal citizenship under the law’’; it represents a directive for a
journey ‘‘that promised its people liberty, and justice, and a union that could be
and should be perfected over time.’’43
One of the tasks of the Obama campaign, one of his purposes in running for presi-
dent of the United States, he goes on to say, is ‘‘to continue the long march of those
who came before us, a march for a more just, more equal, more free, more caring and
more prosperous America,’’ and he follows this with his standard invocation of his
own origins as an epicycle of that larger American journey. When Obama denounces
the controversial comments of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s that were the most obvious
exigence calling this speech forth, an interesting morality emerges. Wright’s com-
ments, Obama declares, ‘‘were not only wrong but divisive.’’44 Divisiveness, in this
construction, is the greater sin and trumps injustice and untruth. Division of the
races threatens Obama’s insistence on the confluence of his own journey, the African
American journey, and the American journey.
Having moved inward from the founding of the country to the specific issue of
racial division that motivates this speech, Obama moves outward again, beginning
with the present moment, reaching out to address the problems that beset all
Americans: black, white, Hispanic, Asian, Native American, ‘‘men and women of
every color and creed who serve together, and fight together, and bleed together
under the same proud flag,’’ finally transcending even the historical moment to take
us back to the genesis of the ideal toward which we strive: 221 years ago and the sign-
ing of a document by a band of patriots signed in Philadelphia, ‘‘that is where the
perfection begins.’’45 Through a series of epicycles that are its parts, Obama moves
back to the transcendent American journey and identifies his campaign’s purposes
with that journey.
The Power of Obama’s Journey

The effect of this rhetorical confluence of journeys is to raise the stakes in the
presidential race. As significant as terrorism, the war in Iraq, and the economic crisis
may be, they can be contained as moments, difficult passages, in the long American
journey. An Obama presidency, even Obama’s candidacy on the other hand,
represents a fork in the road that, in the end, will make ‘‘all the difference.’’
The ubiquitous references to this election as ‘‘historic’’ remind us that history
itself, to the degree that it is seen as progressive—as, for example, it was con-
ceived in the theology of the ancient Jews, which has a direct bearing on our view
of history in the United States, or in Hegel’s famous declaration that ‘‘the History
of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of Freedom.’’46
As part of his 1961 George Macaulay Trevelyan Lectures at Cambridge, Edward
Hallett Carr defended a progressive view of history, coming as close to arguing
that history is, or can be, narrated as a journey as he could come without using
the term:
History properly so-called can be written only by those who find and accept a sense
of direction in history itself. The belief that we have come from somewhere is clo-
sely linked with the belief that we are going somewhere. A society which has lost
belief in its capacity to progress in the future will quickly cease to concern itself
with its progress in the past.47
The burden of progressive history lies especially heavy on the United States. Obama
often represents America as standing at a precipitous moment, along the path to fulfil-
ling this potential. ‘‘This is our moment’’ proclaim some of the campaign signs. The
moment signifies the need to choose between (or among) forks in the road. Some forks
diverge more sharply than others. Our moment, our choice is ‘‘momentous,’’ monu-
mental. As Obama presents it to an audience in Abington, Pennsylvania:
There is only the road we’re traveling on as Americans—and we will rise or fall on
that journey as one nation; as one people.
This country and the dream it represents are being tested in a way that we
haven’t seen in nearly a century. And future generations will judge ours by how
we respond to this test. Will they say that this was a time when America lost its
way and its purpose? When we allowed our own petty differences and broken
politics to plunge this country into a dark and painful recession?
Or will they say that this was another one of those moments when America
overcame? When we battled back from adversity by recognizing that common stake
that we have in each other’s success?
This is one of those moments.48
At this fork in the road, Obama presents us with an opportunity to demonstrate our
commitment to justice and equality of opportunity by electing to lead us out of our
difficult times, for the first time, an African American as president of the United States.
Even as we note that Barack Obama’s candidacy represents the first time that an
African American has headed the ticket of one of the two largest national parties, even
as we note the possibility that he may become the first African American to be elected
president of the United States, there is the lurking implication of inevitability—it’s
going to happen at some point and then again—and we are left to ask the question
‘‘Why not now?’’
It is Obama’s wife, Michelle, who perhaps most succinctly articulates the con-
fluence of Obama’s personal journey with our national journey. In her remarks to
the Democratic National Convention, Ms. Obama spoke of ‘‘the thread that runs
through my journey and Barack’s journey and so many other improbable journeys
that have brought us here tonight, where the current of history meets this new
tide of hope.’’49 ‘‘The current of history’’ and a ‘‘new tide of hope,’’ with the
introduction of aquatic metaphors, Ms. Obama takes us to the literal meanings

of ‘‘confluence:’’ ‘‘the flowing together of two or more streams . . . the combined
stream formed by conjunction.’’50 The separate streams on which we were travel-
ing have come together; we have met at a common place on the river, each on
our own journey, but having met, and having discovered that we share a desti-
nation, shall we not travel together, combining our resources for our mutual
benefit?
Policy positions and program proposals aside, the election of Barack Obama,
viewed from the perspective of the confluence of his journey with our journey
as a people, provides us with an opportunity to move forward toward our des-
tiny, toward the realization of the American ideal. As Obama himself has put
it: ‘‘I have asserted a firm conviction—a conviction rooted in my faith in God
and my faith in the American people—that working together we can move
beyond some of our old racial wounds, and that in fact we have no choice if
we are to continue on the path of a more perfect union.’’51 Obama has excited
millions of Americans with the possibility that our country has reached a trans-
formative moment, that the United States, 232 years after the publication of the
document that set us off on our journey as a nation, is finally at a point where an
African American can be a serious contender for the nation’s top leadership pos-
ition, that the United States has, perhaps belatedly but at least finally, passed
some check point on the way to the unachievable but ever-beckoning finish line
of ‘‘justice and equality for all.’’
The allure of this metaphorical finish line, the end point of, in this case, a conflu-
ence of metaphorical journeys, is indicated by Osborn’s explanation of the power of
double association in archetypal metaphors. ‘‘Arising from fundamental interests of
men,’’ Osborn writes, archetypal metaphors ‘‘in turn activate basic motivational
energies within an audience, and if successful turn such energies into a powerful cur-
rent running in favor of the speaker’s recommendations.’’52 Obama’s move from the
personal journey to the collective journey, as with the exploitation by other rhetors of
the metaphors of light and dark, the sea, ascent and descent, take us to the very
essence of the Jungian archetype, a delightful paradox perhaps that a man so closely
identified with change harnesses for his purposes one of a family of metaphors so
utterly primordial.
Notes
[1] ‘‘Archetypal Metaphor: The Light-Dark Family,’’ Quarterly Journal of Speech 53 (1967):
115–126; ‘‘The Evolution of the Archetypal Sea in Rhetoric and Poetic,’’ Quarterly Journal
of Speech 63 (1977): 347–363. Though the essay on the light-dark family is better known
and more widely read and reproduced, ‘‘The Archetypal Sea’’ presents Osborn in full mas-
tery of his subject and his form.
[2] Osborn, ‘‘The Light-Dark Family,’’ 115.
[3] Barack Obama, ‘‘Full Text of Senator Barack Obama’s Announcement for President,’’
Obama News & Speeches, http://www.barackobama.com/2007/02/10/remarks_of_senator_
barack_obam_11.php (accessed 03 September 2008).
[4] Barack Obama, ‘‘Remarks of Senator Barack Obama (Dayton, OH),’’ Obama News &
Speeches, http://www.barackobama.com/2008/10/09/remarks_of_senator_barack_obam_
132.php (accessed 13 October 2008).
[5] Northrup Frye, ‘‘The Journey as Metaphor,’’ in Northrup Frye, Myth and Metaphor: Selected
Essays, 1974–1988, ed. Robert D. Denham, 212–215. (Charlottesville: University Press of
Virginia, 1990.)
[7] Frye, ‘‘The Journey as Metaphor, 217.
[8] Ibid., 214–215.
[10] Frye, ‘‘The Journey as a Metaphor,’’ 212.
[11] Hermann Stelzner, ‘‘The Quest Story and Nixon’s November 3, 1969 Address,’’ Quarterly
Journal of Speech 57 (1971): 163–172.
[12] See, for example, Perry Miller’s classic Errand into the Wilderness (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard UP, 1956).
[13] ‘‘The American Scholar’’ in The Portable Emerson, ed. Carl Bode in collaboration with
Malcolm Cowley, 71 (New York: Penguin, 1981).
[14] ‘‘The March of the Flag’’ in American Forum: Speeches on Historic Issues, 1788–1900, eds.
E. J. Wrage and B. Baskerville, 353, 354 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1967).
[15] ‘‘Inaugural Address’’ in Contemporary American Voices: Significant Speeches in American
History, 1945-Present, eds. J. R. Andrews and D. Zarefsky, 130 (New York: Longman, 1991).
[16] ‘‘If There is No Struggle There is no Progress’’ in Lift Every Voice: African American
Oratory, 1787–1900, eds. P. S. Foner and R. J. Branham, 310 (Tuscaloosa: University of
Alabama Press, 1998).
[17] Crafting Equality: America’s Anglo-African Word (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1993).
[18] (New York: Vintage Books, 1962), 81.
[19] Ibid., 10.
[20] ‘‘We Shall Overcome’’ in Contemporary American Voices: Significant Speeches in American
History, 1945-Present, eds. J. R. Andrews and D. Zarefsky, 94-95 (New York: Longman,
1991).
[21] Ibid., 95.
[22] ‘‘’I’ve Been to the Mountaintop’: The Critic as Participant’’ in Texts in Context: Critical
Dialogues on Significant Episodes in American Political Rhetoric, eds. M. C. Leff and F. J
Kauffeld, 149–166 (Davis, CA: Hermagoras Press, 1995).
[23] In Contemporary American Voices: Significant Speeches in American History, 1945-Present,
eds. J. R. Andrews and D. Zarefsky, 120 (New York: Longman, 1991).
[24] ‘‘Remarks of Senator Barack Obama: ‘A More Perfect Union’,’’ Obama News & Speeches,
http://www.barackobama.com/2008/03/18/remarks_of_senator_barack_obam_53.php
(accessed 03 September 2008).
[25] See especially Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (New
York: Three Rivers Press, 2004).
[27] John Nichols, ‘‘Obama Tears Down the Wall,’’ CBS News The Nation, http:// www.cbsnews.
com/stories/2008/07/25/opinion/main4293567.shtml (accessed 13 August 2008).
[28] John McCormick, ‘‘Obama in Red, White, and Blue,’’ Chicago Tribune, June 30, 2008,
http://www.swamppolitics.com/news/politics/blog/2008/06/obama_in_red_white_and_blue.
html (accessed 29 July 2008).
[29] Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream (New
York: Three Rivers Press, 2006), 242.
[30] Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 10th ed., s.v. ‘‘episode.’’
[31] Christi Parsons, ‘‘Iowa Results Pump Up Obama Crowd,’’ Chicago Tribune Web Edition,
January 4, 2008, http://www.swamppolitics.com/news/politics/blog/2008/01/_iowa_results_

pump_up_obama_cro.html (accessed 03 September 2008).
[32] Barack Obama, ‘‘Remarks of Senator Barack Obama: Final Primary Night,’’ Obama News &
Speeches, http://www.barackobama.com/2008/06/03/remarks_of_senator_barack_obam_73.
php (accessed 03 September 2008).
[33] BET Blast, ‘‘Obama’s Journey to the Whitehouse,’’ BET.com, http://www.bet.com/onblast/
?chan=4&id=1912&sub=20&itype=v (accessed 03 September 2008.
[34] Barack Obama, ‘‘Selma Voting Rights March Commemoration,’’ Obama News & Speeches,
http://www.barackobama.com/2007/03/04/selma_voting_rights_march_comm.php
(accessed 03 September 2008).
[35] Barack Obama, ‘‘Remarks for Senator Barack Obama: Remembering Dr. Martin Luther
King, Jr.,’’ Obama News & Speeches, http://www.barackobama.com/2008/04/04/remarks_
for_senator_barack_oba_4.php (accessed 03 September 2008).
[36] ‘‘I Have a Dream’’ in Contemporary American Voices: Significant Speeches in American
History, 1945-Present, eds. In J. R. Andrews and D. Zarefsky, 80 (New York: Longman,
1991).
[37] ‘‘Announcement for President.’’
[38] Ibid.
[39] ‘‘Remarks of Senator Barack Obama: The American Promise (Democratic Convention),’’
Obama News & Speeches, http://www.barackobama.com/2008/08/28/remarks_of_senator_
barack_obam_108.php (accessed on 03 September 2008).
[40] Audacity of Hope, 53.
[41] Ibid., 122.
[42] ‘‘A More Perfect Union.’’
[43] ‘‘A More Perfect Union.’’ In The Audacity of Hope, Obama makes this metaphor explicit,
writing ‘‘The Constitution envisions a road map by which we marry passion to reason, the
ideal of individual freedom to the demands of community’’ (95). See also his comments in
‘‘A More Perfect Union:’’ This union may never be perfect, but generation after generation
has shown that it can always be perfected.’’ In his closing statement for the second debate
on October 7, Obama described America as a journey: ‘‘We need fundamental change.
That’s what’s at stake in this election. That’s the reason I decided to run for president,
and I’m hopeful that all of you are prepared to continue this extraordinary journey that
we call America.’’ From a transcript posted to http://indiedesign.typepad.com/inspire_
emotion/2008/10/obamamccain—t.html (10/10/08).
[45] Ibid.
[46] From ‘‘The Philosophy of History’’ in The Age of Ideology, ed. Henry D. Aiken, 90 (New
York: New American Library, 1956).
[47] What is History? (New York: Vintage, 1961), 176.
[48] Barack Obama, ‘‘Obama’s Remarks in Abington, PA,’’ Forbes Politics.com, http://www.
realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/10/obamas_remarks_in_abington_pa.html (accessed 10
October 2008).
[49] ‘‘Remarks of Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson,’’ Obama News & Speeches, http://
www.barackobama.com/2008/08/25/remarks_of_michelle_obama_and_1.php (accessed 03
September 2008).
[50] Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 10th ed., s.v. ‘‘confluence.’’
[52] ‘‘Light-Dark Family,’’ 116.

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This article was downloaded by: [University of California Santa Cruz]

On: 31 October 2014, At: 15:21

Southern Communication Journal

Barack Obama and America's Journey

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10417940802571151

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Barack Obama and America’s Journey

Forty-one years after the original publication of Michael Osborn’s ‘‘Archetypal

ISSN 1041-794x (print) # 2009 Southern States Communication Association

to Springfield, Illinois metamorphosed, first, into a national journey motivated by

to the realization of America’s promise. In Dayton, Ohio on October 9, 2008, Obama

The Journey as Archetypal Metaphor

ouac’s transgressive aimlessness shocks and titillates us much as pornography does;

The Road to Racial Equality in America

Barack Obama’s (African) American Journey

The Obama Candidacy and the Confluence of Three Journeys

The ‘‘double association’’ that Osborn ascribes to archetypal metaphors makes

locates its rewards. It directs us toward a destination, a direction to which it naturally

The Power of Obama’s Journey

introduction of aquatic metaphors, Ms. Obama takes us to the literal meanings

January 4, 2008, http://www.swamppolitics.com/news/politics/blog/2008/01/_iowa_results_

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